By Holland Cooke
Consultant
BLOCK ISLAND, RI — It’s Tuesday, but the Monday Memo isn’t taking a week off. Inflation is THAT urgent. All this month I’m outlining easy economies you can share with listeners, and use yourself, to cope. In last week’s column: Your Renegotiation Hit List, and 4 Fundamental Frugalities.
When I say “Francis Ford Coppola,” you think “The Godfather,” right?
Have you tried his wines? In Rhode Island where I live, Coppola wines are $12 or $13, sometimes less on end caps.
Shopping for vodka? Remember, it’s merely…vodka, and all brands begin at an ethanol plant. Flavors aside, the difference between brands is how fancy the bottle is — and those Belvedere and Chopin and Grey Goose bottles sure are works of art — and how many times it was distilled. Browse the vodka aisle (and end caps) and you’ll see unfamiliar brands distilled 5, 6, 7 times. They get the job done nicely. And I say so after a rigorous series of tests.
TV on YOUR terms.
Nobody loves their cable company, except for Internet access. And that may be all you need to find what YOU want to watch, rather than the several hundred channels the cable or satellite menu force-feeds you.
Explore – no, DEVOUR — CordCuttersNews.com, a buyer’s guide for spending less – or NOTHING — on television. Founder Luke Bouma told me “for the vast majority of Americans, everything they want to watch is available streaming.” The only reason many still subscribe to cable or satellite is live sports; and – smelling money – many team channels now offer streaming.
Some cord-cutters do end up paying cable-size money, but what they end up with is 100% their menu.
More next week.
Holland Cooke (HollandCooke.com) is author of the E-book “Spot-On: Commercial Copy Points That Earned The Benjamins,” a FREE download here, and “Multiply Your Podcast Subscribers, Without Buying Clicks,” available from Talkers books. HC is a consultant working at the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow him on Twitter @HollandCooke